For better or for worse, 2025 is upon us, and, with it, all of the uncertainty to which our most recent election has given rise. Over the last 60 days, we have watched as the incoming administration prepares to implement the agenda of Project 2025 it so vehemently denounced during the campaign season. The authors of this far-right manifesto have been nominated for high level positions that span the breadth of the federal government. The collective lack of integrity and decency have been on public display now for weeks. Meanwhile, citizens, lawmakers, and activists are preparing for what’s to come.
“We’re living in unprecedented times” is a common refrain. Indeed, but because the GOP at both the national and state level have written down their plans in such detail, unprecedented does not mean unpredictable. Both Project 2025 and the Texas GOP Platform have outlined very specific goals and an overall vision for the future of governance at the national level and in the state of Texas. While there is strong ideological agreement between the two documents, there are also some very fundamental differences. As we approach the final days of preparation in anticipation of the new legislative session in Texas, it is important to understand these documents, the visions that they hold, how they may interact with each other, and what the possible outcomes may be for Texas citizens.
HOW PROJECT 2025 and the TEXAS GOP PLATFORM ALIGN
Project 2025 and the Texas GOP platform share several key ideological and policy priorities, reflecting broader conservative goals at both the state and federal levels. These are the areas in which we can expect the Abbott and Trump administrations to work cooperatively, regardless of impacts to local communities. These similarities include:
Energy Policy
Fossil Fuels: Both prioritize energy independence through the expansion of fossil fuel production. Project 2025 advocates for rolling back environmental regulations, aligning with the Texas GOP’s emphasis on supporting the state’s oil and gas industries.
Opposition to Green Energy: Both platforms are skeptical of federal policies promoting renewable energy, favoring market-driven energy solutions.
Immigration
Border Security: Project 2025 and the Texas GOP platform stress strict border security measures, including enhanced border enforcement, increased deportations, and limiting asylum claims.
State Empowerment: Both support state involvement in immigration enforcement, with the Texas GOP advocating for state-level action to address federal gaps.
Government Role and Regulation
Reducing Federal Power: Both advocate for limiting the size and scope of the federal government, returning power to the states, and cutting back on regulatory agencies.
Free Market Policies: Deregulation to promote business growth is a shared goal, consistent with Texas’s economic policies favoring minimal government interference.
Social Issues
Education: Both platforms support school choice initiatives, including vouchers and charter schools, and oppose the teaching of accurate and complete historical perspectives.
LGBTQ+ Rights: They emphasize restricting policies related to gender identity and sexual orientation, aligning with conservative views on family and social structures.
Climate and Environmental Policy
Both dismiss stringent climate change mitigation measures, focusing instead on economic growth and energy production, even at the expense of environmental considerations.
Healthcare
Both favor reducing federal involvement in healthcare, opposing Medicaid expansion and advocating for market-driven solutions.
WHERE PROJECT 2025 and the TEXAS GOP PLATFORM DIVERGE
While Project 2025 and the Texas GOP platform align on many conservative principles, they diverge in focus, tone, and some specific policy stances. Here are some of the key differences:
Scope and Focus
Project 2025: Designed as a federal blueprint for a potential Republican administration, it focuses on reshaping federal agencies and policy implementation at the national level.
Texas GOP Platform: Primarily state-oriented, addressing Texas-specific issues such as water rights, rural broadband, and state sovereignty.
Approach to Federalism
Project 2025: Seeks to centralize conservative governance at the federal level, reforming agencies like the EPA and DOJ.
Texas GOP: Emphasizes state sovereignty, even endorsing nullification of federal laws and secession ("Texit"), which Project 2025 does not advocate.
Election Policies
Project 2025: Supports measures to enhance election security at the federal level, such as voter ID requirements and monitoring mail-in ballots.
Texas GOP: Takes a more aggressive stance, opposing federal involvement in elections and advocating for more restrictive state measures, such as eliminating early voting and electronic voting machines.
Energy Policy
Project 2025: Broadly supports fossil fuel development while scaling back renewable energy mandates at the federal level.
Texas GOP: Focuses on protecting Texas’s dominance in energy production but opposes federal subsidies for any energy source, including renewables. (This could have implications for Governor Abbott’s plans to invest in nuclear power as subsidies are often necessary to make nuclear energy competitive.)
Social Issues
Project 2025: Advocates socially conservative policies but focuses on administrative reforms.
Texas GOP: Takes a harder line on LGBTQ+ rights, proposing outright bans on gender-affirming care for all ages and criminalizing certain expressions of gender identity, which Project 2025 does not explicitly propose. Additionally, the Texas GOP calls for the end of no-fault divorce, which would lead to the entrapment of women and children in domestic violence scenarios.
Education
Project 2025: Aims to reform the Department of Education to limit federal influence and promote school choice. Functions of the DOE would be reassigned to other Departments for administration.
Texas GOP: Calls for the complete abolition of the Department of Education, reflecting a more radical stance. The Texas GOP states plainly within its platform that the functions of the DOE should be discontinued rather than being reassigned.
Religious Foundations
Project 2025: Promotes conservative values but operates within the framework of the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
Texas GOP: Pushes for explicitly recognizing the U.S. as a Christian nation and reducing the separation of church and state, a position not mirrored in Project 2025. We are already seeing the implications of this view in decisions made by the SBOE regarding elementary school curriculum.
Tone and Rhetoric
Project 2025: Frames its proposals in terms of governance reform and federal realignment.
Texas GOP: Uses more explicitly ideological and populist rhetoric, reflecting the influence of grassroots movements.
These divergences highlight the Texas GOP’s more state-focused and sometimes radical agenda compared to the broader, governance-focused goals of Project 2025.
HOW THE TEXAS GOP PLATFORM IS
MORE EXTREME THAN PROJECT 2025
The Texas GOP platform contains several positions that could be considered more extreme than Project 2025, reflecting the party’s state-specific priorities and the influence of its grassroots base. Here are key areas where the Texas GOP platform pushes boundaries beyond Project 2025:
Secession
The Texas GOP platform includes language supporting a referendum on Texas’s secession from the United States ("Texit"). This is a uniquely extreme stance not mirrored in Project 2025, which focuses on reshaping federal governance rather than advocating for disunion.
Election Integrity
The Texas GOP platform calls for measures like the elimination of early voting, requiring paper ballots, and opposing federal election oversight. These positions often go beyond Project 2025’s federal election security proposals.
Gun Rights
While Project 2025 supports Second Amendment protections, the Texas GOP platform takes a more expansive approach, opposing all forms of gun control, including red-flag laws and background check expansions. The Texas GOP is also advocating for an expansion of guns in schools by allowing teachers with their LTC to carry weapons on campus.
Nullification
The Texas GOP explicitly endorses the right of states to nullify federal laws it deems unconstitutional. This goes beyond Project 2025, which focuses on curtailing federal power through legal and administrative reforms.
Education
The Texas GOP platform advocates abolishing the U.S. Department of Education altogether, whereas Project 2025 primarily seeks to reform it. Additionally, the Texas GOP’s stance on public education includes broader support for dismantling the system in favor of privatization. (This agenda is funded by West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, in addition to out of state donors including Jeff Yass who alone has donated $10 million to Abbott’s efforts to defund Texas public schools in violation of the Texas Constitution.)
Anti-LGBTQ+ Policies
The Texas GOP platform includes more explicitly aggressive language and policies regarding LGBTQ+ rights, such as banning all gender-affirming care, even for adults, and criminalizing drag performances. Project 2025 also includes socially conservative policies but with less overt focus on state-level enforcement.
Religious Foundations
The Texas GOP platform more strongly emphasizes the idea of the U.S. being a Christian nation, calling for the removal of the separation of church and state, a position not as explicitly articulated in Project 2025.
The Texas GOP platform reflects the state’s highly conservative base and operates with fewer constraints than a federally-focused initiative like Project 2025. It often ventures into more radical territory, advocating for positions that challenge federal authority and longstanding national norms. As such, the Texas GOP functions as a means to shift the Overton Window and drive the conversion of acceptable discourse in American society. The key role of the Texas GOP in its current form is to push the national dialogue further to the right.
POTENTIAL ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF
FULL IMPLEMENTATION OF PROJECT 2025 FOR TEXAS
The full implementation of Project 2025 could negatively impact the Texas economy in several significant ways:
1. Renewable Energy Sector Decline
Texas leads the U.S. in wind energy production and is a major player in solar energy. Project 2025’s rollback of federal subsidies and incentives for renewable energy could:
Reduce investments in wind and solar projects, leading to job losses in these growing sectors.
Undermine Texas's ability to diversify its energy economy, making it more vulnerable to fluctuations in fossil fuel markets.
2. Labor Shortages and Workforce Issues
Project 2025’s strict immigration policies, including reduced access to work visas and increased deportations, would disproportionately affect Texas, where industries like agriculture, construction, and hospitality rely heavily on immigrant labor. Additionally, the tech sector is threatened by the ongoing conversation driven by Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy around H1B visas. As a billionaire resident of Texas, Musk has the potential to have an outsized impact on the implementation of immigration policy within Texas itself.
Labor shortages could increase operational costs for businesses and delay projects, impacting economic growth.
Consumers could face higher prices for goods and services, particularly in agriculture and food industries.
3. Economic Costs of Climate Risks
Texas is highly susceptible to climate-related disasters, including hurricanes, droughts, and extreme heat. Project 2025’s scaling back of climate change mitigation efforts and disaster preparedness funding could:
Increase the economic costs of responding to natural disasters.
Lead to higher insurance premiums, property damage, and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal and rural areas.
4. Healthcare Challenges
Reducing federal influence in healthcare and scaling back Medicaid could have profound effects in Texas, where millions of residents rely on Medicaid for access to care.
Rural hospitals, already struggling, could face closure without federal support, further exacerbating healthcare deserts in rural Texas.
Healthcare-related job losses could affect local economies.
Additional increases in maternal and infant mortality as women and children lose access to healthcare.
Additional expenses for public schools that lose reimbursement opportunities for providing eligible special education services.
Increased tax burden for property owners as counties attempt to recoup tax dollars sent to hospitals to offset care expenses for uninsured patients.
5. Disruptions in Education and Workforce Development
Project 2025’s reduction of federal funding for education, including cuts to Pell Grants and federal support for public schools, could harm Texas's educational system and workforce preparedness.
Students in low-income communities may face reduced opportunities, limiting the state’s future talent pipeline.
A less-educated workforce could deter businesses from relocating to Texas or expanding operations within the state.
6. Increased Trade Disruptions
Texas is a hub for international trade, particularly with Mexico. Policies under Project 2025 that strain relations with trade partners or disrupt border operations could:
Impede the flow of goods and services, impacting industries dependent on cross-border commerce.
Increase costs for businesses reliant on imports and exports.
The Texas Association of Business has already expressed concern about the economic impacts of closing the international Bridge of the Americas to commercial traffic at the Juarez-El Paso border, with economic repercussions for Texas and the US being described as “catastrophic.”
7. Rising Costs for Local Governments
The emphasis on states absorbing responsibilities from the federal government could place significant financial burdens on Texas.
The state may need to increase taxes or reallocate funds to cover costs for healthcare, education, and disaster response, affecting public services and economic stability. This conflicts with the Texas GOP’s call to abolish all property taxes within the next 12 years and has additional implications for the future availability of public services.
8. Housing Market Pressures
Policies discouraging immigration and population growth could weaken demand in Texas's booming housing market, potentially leading to a slowdown in construction and real estate sectors.
While some sectors, like fossil fuels, may benefit in the short term, the broader economic implications of Project 2025—reduced labor availability, strained public services, and insufficient climate and disaster mitigation—pose significant risks to Texas's long-term economic health and resilience. These challenges could slow growth and exacerbate inequality, undermining the state’s status as a leading economic powerhouse.
POTENTIAL IMPACTS OF
FULL IMPLEMENTATION OF TEXAS GOP PLATFORM
The full implementation of the Texas GOP Platform could have wide-ranging negative impacts on the Texas economy due to its emphasis on extreme deregulation, anti-immigration policies, and aggressive social measures. Here are some of these potential economic consequences:
1. Labor Shortages and Workforce Challenges
Immigration Restrictions:
The platform’s opposition to immigration, including stricter border enforcement and reduced pathways for legal migration, would exacerbate labor shortages in industries heavily reliant on immigrant labor, such as agriculture, construction, hospitality, and healthcare.
Previous legislation such as SB 4 and SB 147 demonstrate the commitment of the Texas GOP to discriminatory policies based on race, ethnicity, and national origin.
Increased costs for businesses due to limited labor supply could lead to higher consumer prices and slower project completion times.
Economic Ripple Effects:
Industries like food production, dependent on immigrant workers, would face operational challenges, increasing costs for Texans.
Labor shortages would deter new business investments and expansions in the state.
2. Renewable Energy Stagnation
Opposition to Federal and State Incentives:
The Texas GOP’s stance against federal subsidies for renewable energy, coupled with resistance to wind and solar energy development, could stall growth in these sectors.
Wind energy, a major contributor to the Texas economy, would face reduced investment, leading to job losses and hindering the state’s ability to diversify its energy portfolio.
Energy Costs:
A failure to embrace renewable energy could lead to higher electricity costs as demand grows and grid stability remains an issue, particularly during extreme weather events.
3. Climate Risks and Infrastructure Damage
Resistance to Climate Change Action:
The platform’s rejection of climate science and opposition to mitigation measures would leave Texas more vulnerable to the economic impacts of extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves.
Increased infrastructure damage, rising insurance costs, and higher recovery expenses would burden state and local governments and disrupt business operations.
Missed Economic Opportunities:
Ignoring renewable energy and green technology industries could cause Texas to lose out on investments and jobs in emerging markets. By failing to invest appropriately, Texas risks falling further behind other global leaders in energy and technology development.
4. Education and Workforce Development Challenges
Defunding Public Education:
Proposals to eliminate federal influence and funding in education and implement universal school choice could weaken the public education system, particularly in underserved communities.
Reduced quality in public education would harm the state’s long-term workforce readiness, deterring businesses that rely on a skilled labor pool.
Destabilizing a primary employer in rural communities risks plunging these areas even further into poverty with fewer options for sustainable employment.
Higher Education:
Cuts to programs like Pell Grants would make higher education less accessible, reducing the state’s talent pipeline and innovation potential.
5. Social Policies Driving Economic Losses
Anti-LGBTQ+ Measures:
The platform’s strict policies on LGBTQ+ issues, such as bans on gender-affirming care and restrictions on expressions of identity, could deter businesses and events from operating in Texas.
Companies that value diversity may relocate or avoid expanding in the state, leading to job losses and reduced economic activity.
Reputational Harm:
A hostile social climate could tarnish Texas’s reputation as a business-friendly state, discouraging tourism, conferences, and corporate investment.
6. Healthcare System Strain
Opposition to Federal Healthcare Funding:
The platform’s rejection of Medicaid expansion and emphasis on privatizing healthcare would strain the already fragile healthcare infrastructure, particularly in rural areas.
Rural hospital closures would increase healthcare deserts, leading to poorer health outcomes and higher healthcare costs.
Public Health Implications:
Reduced access to affordable healthcare would hurt workforce productivity and increase absenteeism, affecting overall economic performance.
The Texas Association of Business has released a statement linking Texas’s state-specific healthcare requirements to higher health insurance premiums and encouraging preservation of and compliance with ERISA standards.
7. Economic Isolationism
Texit and Nullification:
The platform’s promotion of secession ("Texit") and nullification of federal laws could create significant uncertainty for businesses operating in Texas.
Loss of federal funding and trade agreements would destabilize key industries, from agriculture to technology.
International companies may view Texas as a less stable or predictable investment environment, reducing foreign direct investment.
8. Impact on Technology and Innovation
Regulatory Overreach:
Aggressive stances against perceived "woke" corporate policies could deter tech companies and startups that prioritize diversity and innovation.
The platform’s focus on limiting progressive values in business may stifle creative industries and innovation hubs in cities like Austin and Dallas.
9. Rising Inequality and Economic Instability
Taxation Policies:
The platform’s push for regressive tax policies, such as increasing reliance on consumption taxes, could disproportionately burden low- and middle-income Texans, reducing consumer spending and economic mobility.
Social Safety Nets:
Reducing state involvement in welfare programs would increase poverty rates, putting further strain on local economies and public services.
10. Trade and Economic Interconnectivity
Strained Relations with Mexico:
Policies that heighten border tensions could disrupt trade with Mexico, Texas’s largest trading partner, harming industries that rely on cross-border commerce.
Supply Chain Issues:
Increased barriers at the border could slow down supply chains, increasing costs for manufacturers and retailers.
The full implementation of the Texas GOP platform could result in substantial economic harm to the state by creating labor shortages, weakening public services, deterring business investment, and exacerbating climate and infrastructure risks. While it seeks to bolster certain conservative priorities, its far-reaching policies risk undermining the state’s long-term growth, competitiveness, and economic resilience.
While it is unlikely that the GOP will be able to fully implement its stated goals, it is important to recognize that this is the vision of the future that the Republican Party is actively working towards. The nearly 1,000 pages of these combined documents inform the positions and actions our current elected officials are expected to take. Our representatives at both the state and federal level have already been threatened with political retribution in the event that they deviate from these stated goals to act in the best interest of their constituents. While nearly 200 Republicans at the federal level have already defied the incoming President, it remains to be seen if Texas Republicans will have the same reaction to Abbott’s agenda and policy goals. Ken Paxton is set to tour Texas districts of defiant Representatives in the coming days.
As we anticipate the upcoming legislative sessions in Washington, D.C. and in Austin, it is imperative that Texans remain engaged in political discourse through local assembly and consistent communication with our representatives. Look for ways to get involved with your local elections. City leaders and school boards will be instrumental in advocating for local control and resources as the GOP works to consolidate power at the state and federal levels.